Promiseland

[Fetian]

Episode 9!

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Ten minutes in and I somehow haven't had anything to say about this episode

Why does Nuala not know if she's seen her brother without a glamour

A gun feels like a very blunt tool for this

They try very hard to make Loki look cool but he just comes off a dork

I'm not really feeling Destiny's garden being these ruins

Fakeass lookin baby

Love Constantine looking up a spell on her phone

lmao Corinthian

lmao Corinthian

Oh I forgot this echoes thing was from Sandman

'It sounds like him' it does not

lmao Corinthian

This really is just not building tension for the ending like it needs to be

'Even if he had killed your son' Listen to them!

'What am I gonna say to his mum?' Honestly you could get away with nothing

This attempt at a romantic subplot is not at all working. Just not enough room for it in the time they're giving it

Figures that a fairy wouldn't call the Furies the Kindly Ones

That episode had a little trouble holding my attention. It's interesting how much of this feels slow considering how much they have to fit in to the season. I think just because they're having to cut a lot, so it's losing a lot of depth

[Fetian]

Episode 10! I suspect this is the finale, just because I think the first season was 10 episodes

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We are missing so much of Lyta's journey

The vibrations moving Merv's lid around is a nice touch

Still really don't like Cain's actor for this role

I think Nuala didn't get enough of a character arc either

Whoever did the wings on these CGI characters doesn't know what wings look like

Various Beast Noises™

This is so talk-y. It works for a comic because a lot of story has to be conveyed through text in a comic, but it it not working for a tv show

Kind of getting a 'why is Cain even here' vibe from this scene

Like I don't know why he's here, not that the show or characters don't know why he's here

Dream did just fuckin' run off to his certain doom without saying anything to his family about it

The first season did some fun stuff with the Maiden, Mother and Crone switching places while they talked but they haven't really done any of that this season. It's a missed opportunity

This moment with Matthew doesn't really feel earned, again because we're missing a bunch of character development

God horse legs are so skinny

Okay but does she get a sheath, or

Oh okay she just had one

Without a sword in it

Maybe I missed something

Imagining Dream just sitting around with the Kindly Ones for half an hour, in complete brooding silence

This is Dream's Last Big Moment so I won't judge him for getting all whiny about it

Honestly Dream's best move is to just kill himself. I bet that would piss the furies off

Lyta also just standing around for half an hour

Oh do we get a swordfight

Oh

Unsure of the point of Delirium's little sidequest here

Oh my god Jacob Anderson??

[Fetian]

Okay uh that wasn't the last episode! Episode 11!

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How much more could there possibly be?

Rude

'I think he might be a little like me' A concerning thing to hear from the Corinthian in particular

'Is it mine?' ha

Oh my god this episode is over an hour, what is in here??

Was there an entire extra volume after the climax that I forgot about??

(Like obviously there's a denouement and stuff but I do not remember there being enough to fill an entire other episode let alone an extra-long one (not stuff that would fit in the context of this series, anyway, comics are complicated))

I wonder whose idea the funeral was

'He told me about you.' 'He told me about you, too.' I cannot imagine Morpheus gossiping about people with anyone under any circumstances

Daniel's coat just looks like a bathrobe

It's the embroidering on it, makes it look kind of fuzzy

Oh those were pumpkin seeds. Fuckin' tiny ass pumpkin seeds

John Constantine would 100% fuck the Corinthian

I mean if you want to know what happened I'm sure Lucienne could fill you in. But sure, ask the guy who was dead for most of it

Hey has Daniel even met Death. Because I bet She could fill him in

poor Daniel

Very Death and Return of Superman

Desire's role is so much smaller in this plot than it is in the comics

Highlighting Richard Madoc's attendance is a little weird, like dude is supposed to be being tortured right now for raping a muse

So many people showing up fashionably late to the funeral

This feels like the show wants to be taking Morpheus' death seriously but it does not feel like it's taking it seriously. It's trying have 'he died and everyone misses him and it's tragic' and eat 'there's a new Dream so everything's okay' too

Even the funeral attendees don't really feel like they're taking the funeral seriously

I don't know why we keep cutting to Richard

You could absolutely do an entire series about, someone dying, and someone else taking their role, and they're kind of the same person? But they're not? Do you have space to grieve in that? Do you continue whatever relationship you had with the first person with this new person? How weird it is that they keep reminding you of the other one, how they know and do things the other did.

You died, and you kind of came back and you're kind of someone else now, and no one knows how to treat you

Hob's story is a little weird knowing that there are people walking around who are ten times as old as he is and still didn't want to die

I bet kissing Corinthian is all teeth

Boy this parade of conclusions is kind of a slog

[Fetian]

And of course they've done High Cost of Living

I bet they originally planned this to get released separately, like Calliope and Dream of a Thousand Cats

Well here we go!

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Oh boy this one has a strobe warning

Death asking someone if they're alright is kind of a dick move

Leaving his phone there just because the screen's broken is also wild

That bowl is way too small, but I suppose Death wouldn't be very good at that sort of thing

Being just a little suspicious

Just a little

What the fuck

So much for her bargaining thing

Ain't that just the way, you put something somewhere no-one will find it and then you can't find it

So like in the comics it's nice to get some closure for Mad Hettie but the show hasn't exactly endeared the audience to her,

This actor is not even trying

This guy's got a bit of a Benedict Cumberbatch sort of look. Like his little brother or something

Oh he's Merlin, that's why he looks familiar

Bruh he clearly does not want to talk about this, why are you digging in to his history with his ex

All these people having all these quiet conversations in a raging club

'She'll tell you if you ask, she's not shy about it' You sure about that?

Ope there's the flashing

Have you ever considered being less of a fucking downer

Oh hey plot

'Doesn't mean I go around killing people.' 'Doesn't it?' Ha

'You don't have free will?' 'My siblings and I have our duties' I mean one of them did just fuck off, there is that

Oh shit

'Once they're gone it's too late' Okay but again we've literally had stories where people have come back, so

Honestly it's going to be a little weird to go back to the comics and get Death as a white woman. This actress has done a great job

Brother almost forgot to give this woman her soul back

'It always ends' except for the people for whom it doesn't

Okay! I liked that, it was nice.

[Fetian]

My feelings on season 2 as a whole are kind of meh, it felt more like they were trying to hit the right narrative beats than they were trying to tell a good story, and the result is that it's all kind of flat. Definitely some good moments, but I did notice that there were less of them as the series came to its conclusion. Definitely needed to be three seasons, I believe they could have done it in that.

I think maybe it would have worked better for me if I had spread the episodes out a little more

I've got some other thoughts but I don't want to get them down right now. What I am going to do is reread the comics -- I've decided to start where the last season left off rather than skipping forward to where this season started, so I've got a ways to go

[Fetian]

Comic reactions

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So I was never particularly a fan of the Midsummer Night's Dream comic, because a play adapted into a comic seems silly and I'm not really a fan of Shakespeare or renaissance-esque writing anyway. Rereading it it's not quite as bad as I remember but I think the show did a very good job of incorporating this issue into the adaptation -- it manages to include everything important without slowing things down by making it all its Own Thing

Facade is one of the issues that looks at The Tragedy of Being a Superhero, which is not super relevant to the greater Sandman storyline except that in the last pages of the issue, Death visits Rainie (Element Girl, with the power to transform her body into any element) and talks to her while Rainie contemplates suicide. There's some characterisation here we're missing in the show and some coverage of what it means to be Endless -- namely Death explains that she is not just here, talking to Rainie, but exists everywhere that death is happening, at once. We've also got some of Gaiman's characteristic portrayals of deities and religion, which we don't particularly need to understand the god-stuff happening in the show. Not a tragedy for this story to be missing from the adaptation, but in another world it would have been nice for something like it to appear as a one-off between seasons

The show basically adapted Season of Mists 0 beat-for-beat, except for the bits where Season of Mists 0 just describes all the Endless in blocks of text. We are missing some of the dialogue as the show had to fit in all the lines that were relevant to getting Dream to go back to Hell -- in particular we're missing Desire's insinuations about the other lovers Dream has tortured, which I think the show is poorer without. We also get less Despair, which is a pity because we also get less of her throughout the rest of the adaptation, as well. (Notably Gaiman suggested that the second season would have more Despair, but I'll talk about that later because I've got a number of thoughts about Despair to think)

Most of what got cut from Season of Mists 1 is exposition from the previous issue, so not really a loss. I can't remember if we got Lucien's library in the first season, I feel like it might have come up at some point? If it didn't that's also a trope that's appeared pretty often out of Sandman so not a huge loss there, either. What we do lose is Lucifer characterization, and why Dream sent Cain as his envoy to begin with (mark of Cain means none can touch him, so Cain will get sent back to Dreaming in one piece).

Something not super related to the comics, didn't the first season of the show set Hell up to be going to war in the second season? And then that just, nothing comes of it.

Also as an aside god some of the Sandman issues have such bad artwork. Like it's competent art but it's fuckass for a comic, very stiff, weird facial expressions and poses, no feeling of action

Also lord does Gaiman do a lot of telling in his comics. That's kind of the price you pay for writing about things like dreams, though, hard to make senseless stuff into a visual

Season of Mists 2 gets condensed pretty well in the show, though it's a bit of a pity to lose the stragglers in Hell. But Lucifer's speech works fine pared down as it is, and I don't think the stragglers or other set-pieces would have added much of anything

Season of Mists 3 does some set-up that the series leaves implied (eg Odin freeing Loki, various gods &c travelling to Dreaming), I think the series is stronger for it. Notably the demons in the comics are much more demonic than in the series (where they just look like people), and especially notably the Merkin is a hot lady in the series and, uh

Screenshot_2025-08-12_20-09-20.png

 
in the comic. Something we are missing is Dream's temper -- I think we never really see him lose it in the show, but in the comics he has a pretty bad one, under his stoicism, and I think that helps contextualise things like him damning Nada for ten thousand years in a way that doesn't come across well in the show

Season of Mists 4 is a little interlude showing what's going on in the mortal realm now that Hell is empty, and since it doesn't have anything to do with Dream it obviously didn't get adapted. That is something I was missing from season 1, you'll recall, that the diner episode didn't go in to how the wider world was being affected by Dee's shenanigans, but in this case I don't think it's particularly missed. This would be a good episode for an anthology, but Sandman (the show) didn't need it

(It's about a boy at a boarding school while everyone else is home for holidays, when the dead (from Hell, specifically) come back to life (in a fashion) and torment him (because they're explicitly bad people))

Season of Mists 5 is another pretty close adaptation, though we get a lot more little moments between the characters in the comic, and Bast and company were removed from the show entirely. I feel here like Dream has more difficulty coming to a decision than in the show, where it felt like he kind of always knew what he was going to do and just wasn't sure the best way to break the news to everyone else. There is a little bit of fun with the art style here, where the art of the comics shifts when Dream is speaking to some of the gods, to more fit their culture's aesthetics, but it's not done particularly well, I think just because the artist wasn't good at it. We'll see more of that later and I'm looking forward to it, definitely something that should have shown up in the show in one way or another

We also miss out on the dreamers being roped in to having a dream about serving the gods during the banquet, which is very fun

Of course the conclusion in Season of Mists 6 is much the same, though how we get there is very different and I approve of the change. In the show, who Dream gives the key to is his own clever decision, but in the comics he's told to do it by God. While the dialogue from the angel during that is great and it's a shame to have lost it and its implications, the change works much better overall. Another change: in the comics Azazel doesn't just straight up eat Choronzon when Dream declines the offer, and Dream ends up saving him as well, which is much better than in the show where Dream doesn't care that Azazel has broken rules of hospitality and the show just hopes we won't notice I guess.

Season of Mists 7 is the conclusion to this arc (and where I'm going to stop for a bit). My main takeaway is that Nada forgives Dream waaaaaayyyy too easily, it's like basically instantaneous. We get more of the angels, and more of what's happening with Hell now, but other than that the beats are largely the same between the show and the comics. A good arc, in my opinion, and the show certainly improved on it in some ways!

[knightofcups]

Episode 10! I suspect this is the finale, just because I think the first season was 10 episodes

one part of this I read as “God Horse (character name) legs are so skinny” and i like it better.

[Fetian]

Guess who has two thumbs and just splashed hot bacon grease on himself

(I'm fine)

(Boy don't it sting though)

[Fetian]

Oh yeah we saw Constantine's ancestor in the first season. Well obviously people are going to be watching the second season without a refresher and obviously that scene is not difficult to forget

Anyway

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Thermidor is the ancestor-Constantine/Orpheus interlude, which the show tied more directly to the find-Destruction plot. Here it's a between-arcs story, which the show obviously didn't have the liberty of doing. It's otherwise basically a straight adaptation, I have no real comments on it. Oh, except that the comic has fucking handwritten cursive for blocks of text and I always hate that, please never do that

August is another between-arcs story about Augustus Caesar pretending to be a beggar because Dream told him (in a dream) that if he did so, he could make plans without the gods seeing what he was up to. These are interstitials that I think happen just because Gaiman has an interest in history, and it doesn't have any particular bearing on the greater plot except maybe for some implications in how the world works. It also makes it harder to tell what issues are going to turn out to be super relevant later, which is a plus for a long-running comic series, but not so much for a two-season netflix series. Obviously this one doesn't appear in the adaptation

As an aside I sure am noticing how much of what Gaiman writes features rape in some way, which prior to a year ago I would have attributed to edgy 90s comics writing, but now. Well. It probably is also edgy 90s comics writing.

Three Septembers and a January features the life of Joshua Norton I, first emperor of the United States, in a Job-like role with the younger Endless making a bet against Dream that they can draw Norton into their domains before he dies. Dream gives Norton the dream of being emperor of the United States, and this role contents Norton and protects him against Despair's, Delirium's, and Desire's attempts to seduce him into despair, delirium, or desire. It's not a great story, to be honest, but the immaturity of the younger Endless is something to note, as well as Dream's susceptibility to it (he is perhaps not so elder as he would like to think), and this is where Desire vows to make Dream "spill family blood" (a kind of out-of-nowhere threat, really)

Another aside here, while we're talking Problematic™ things, is that I'm not going to try to analyse potential racism or other negative caricatures because I do not feel like I have the ability to accurately and fairly do so, and I don't think it's germane to do for a comic series from the 90s whose author has already been cancelled. But there's definitely some stuff in this issue that's making me go yikes

Anyway the Norton issue also does not appear in the adaptation

Slaughter on Fifth Avenue (Game of You 1) follows up on events from the Doll's House arc, and is an arc that I was really looking forward to seeing adapted, in part because I really wanted ash to get to experience it. Unfortunately it did not make it to the show. In it we find that Barbie's hit a rough patch after the events of the dream vortex, and also has apparently stopped dreaming. Her friend Wanda, who is unfortunately an unflattering caricature of a trans woman, but fortunately is also a very sympathetic character, takes Barbie out to breakfast while we have some meanwhile shots of some dream characters in extremely dire straits. One of them somehow escapes into the waking world to get Barbie's help and does not survive the expedition, but does find Barbie, who has a panic attack about her dreams coming to life and goes back to her apartment to be upset about that and her friend's death. We know from Doll's House that, when she dreamed, she dreamed a continuing story every night, and the story has apparently continued without her, to the detriment of said story.

Some of Wanda's dialogue about being trans gets lifted from here and given to her in the show, but other than that I don't think there's anything in particular that the show takes from this arc, and that is likely to continue through the rest of the issues of it, since the show skipped it over and all that. I will continue my reread here and talking about it because I like this arc!

Lullabies of Broadway is a fun one; we get a bit of character development for the other people in Barbie's apartment building: Wanda, two lesbians (one of whom is having a pregnancy scare, the other has a tie to a character from 24 Hours), a bookish woman, and an unfriendly man. We see the dreams of all the characters in fun sequences (Gaiman is honestly pretty good at writing dreams) except for bookish woman (Thessaly) and unfriendly man (George). George turns out to be full of evil birds which he has sent to give nightmares to the others, and Thessaly manages to escape this fate in a way that frankly implies she might be a witch. Meanwhile, Barbie reunites with her old friends in her dreams, who are all pretty pessimistic about the odds of succeeding in their quest.

Bad Moon Rising is where a lot of the criticism of Wanda's character comes from -- not at all all of it, but the way Wanda is treated as not-really-a-woman by characters and narrative understandably doesn't sit right with some people. In this issue, everyone (but Barbie) wakes up from their nightmares and Thessaly shows up to check on them. They all end up going to check on Barbie, who they find is still asleep, clutching a glowing dream-stone to her chest (reminiscent of the dream-stone Dee had in 24 Hours). Thessaly gets Wanda to carry Barbie up to George's apartment, and everyone else follows along -- there they discover that Thessaly has murdered George and stashed his body in the bathtub. Wanda tries to leave, and is unable to due to some magic Thessaly has cast on either the complex residents or the apartment itself -- everyone is stuck there with her. She cuts George's face off to compel him to give her some answers from beyond the grave (he was promised Barbie by the Cuckoo if he did as it commanded, which was to feed everyone else in the apartment complex to said Cuckoo), and then enlists the lesbians to help her draw down the moon so they can travel into Barbie's dream to save her. This is where much of the issue lies -- Wanda cannot help, with the strong implication being that she cannot help because she's "a man", and Wanda is stuck in the apartment, guarding Barbie, while Thesally, Hazel, and Foxglove disappear. I want to note here that the pencil artist for this issue is a different person than the last one, and it both looks much better to my eye in general and also Wanda is drawn much less offensively, which is nice to see.

Beginning to See the Light has a lot of Barbie's quest, including some delightfully fucked up deaths, and ends with Barbie approaching (against her will) the Citadel of the Cuckoo. Meanwhile more transphobia for Wanda, which comes almost exclusively from George, who is, you know, an asshole and antagonist, but 'it's coming from a bad guy, it's fine' rings a little hollow when the only person to defend the trans person is the trans person herself. We're also back to that other artist, yay.

Oh also there's an adorable scene where Nuala's like 'Hey Dream I know you said not to interfere, but I interfered' and Dream is like 'I see.' and starts to walk away, and Nuala is obviously worried that she's in big trouble but then Dream comes back and tells her she did the right thing and she's so happy

Over the Sea to Sky gets us to the climax of one plot and close to the climax of the other -- it turns out that The Cuckoo, the antagonist that Barbie has been questing against -- is a creature that has inserted itself into her psyche and taken up residence in the dreams and memories she left behind as she got older. The Cuckoo wants to escape from the dream, and to lay eggs in the dreams of hundreds of mortals, and because the Cuckoo has the ability to hypnotise people into wanting to nurture it, Barbie agrees to die for its cause. The Cuckoo takes Barbie and the dream-stone to an obelisk, where it is found by Thessaly and the lesbians, who attempt to kill the Cuckoo but are tricked into killing the last of Barbie's dream-friends instead and then fall under the Cuckoo's spell. The Cuckoo successfully enacts its plan to destroy Barbie's dream land (which will, it believes, enable its escape), and Dream shows up to follow through on the compact of the land's destruction. Meanwhile the apartment Wanda, George, Barbie's body, and a homeless woman Wanda invited inside to take shelter, is destroyed by the hurricane caused by Thessaly and the lesbians calling down the moon. End of issue!

In transphobia-land this issue features a mention of another trans woman who has been supported by her family, is happy, and is saving up for gender-affirming surgery, except oops she was killed in a brutal hate crime. Didn't really need that to be in the story, thanks! Just kind of getting the message that it's pointless for trans people to try to be happy.

Aside from that, I continue to enjoy this arc, and I love the Cuckoo.

Christ I forgot Wanda's surname is fucking Mann. Of course it is

So we conclude the story in I Woke Up and One of Us Was Crying, which is part denouement for the Cuckoo story (Barbie uses a boon to wish everyone back home safe and sound, the Cuckoo flies off to live its life somewhere else) but mostly Wanda's funeral (she died in the hurricane), which means the issue is mostly Wanda's family being transphobic assholes about her. This is the issue that has the iconic scene of Barbie crossing Wanda's deadname off her headstone and writing Wanda on it in Wanda's favourite colour of lipstick, a moment that in 2025 rings like kind of a small gesture but was pretty important back in the day. The (black, mentally ill) homeless woman also dies in the hurricane, which feels about as great as the queer person dying. I like this story for the Cuckoo plot, it's very fun and well-written and has neat concepts, but the plot in the waking-world is. Not great! And really unnecessary.

As far as the adaptation is concerned, we do also get all of the funeral stuff in the show, and it does change in that it's Dream talking to the family, not Barbie, and that the aunt is more misguided-but-sympathetic than outright transphobic. Tell you what I am not a fan of how the show treats Wanda, I honestly think it's less well-done than the comics.

[Fetian]

I would like to continue but I should go to bed. More of this tomorrow probably!